A nation united in grief … David Bowie.
Photograph: Richard Young/Res/Shutterstock

Monday morning, 6.50am. A DJ and a news reporter are preparing for their first show of the week, checking the playlists, drinking their coffee. At 6.55, there’s usually handover badinage with the presenter of the previous show, but today, Chris Hawkins just says that Shaun Keaveny’s up next on BBC 6 Music. Keaveny doesn’t know why. Then someone tells him the news. “First thing on a Monday morning’s the best time to break a news story, isn’t it?”, says the man who broke the news to the world, 6 Music news reporter Matt Everitt, two days later. The last accounts Bowie followed on Twitter belonged to presenters from 6 Music, too. “It’s crazy. It’s like he knew what he was doing.” After they checked their sources – and a tweet from Bowie’s son, film director Duncan Jones, confirmed the news – 6 Music announced the death of David Bowie at 7.08am. But something else happened on the day Bowie died: the communal experience of pop took a new, 21st-century form, with an old-fashioned medium, radio, at the heart of it.

David Bowie obituary

Read more

A virtual wake began on Monday courtesy of 6 Music – a clamour of stories and songs, shared by fans young and old. Presenters reported new listeners coming to the station in droves, and a spokesperson confirmed a huge rise in traffic to the station’s social media channels on Monday. Meanwhile, international TV stations that had tuned into the show were requesting interviews with the presenters.

Perhaps it was because Bowie was an alternative popular icon – less mainstream than McCartney, more legendary than Lou Reed – that 6 was the place to celebrate him. There was “utter disbelief” in the studio when the story was proved not to be a hoax, says Everitt.

A superfan since the age of 13, when he wore out his LaserDisc of Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture, Everitt later queued to try to meet his idol at the NEC, Birmingham. (“We finally met in 2002 – I lost my shit altogether.”). So there was raw emotion in his voice when he announced the news – but he says that reaction was a good thing. “When something like that happens, your response can’t not be genuine. Shaun and I had had a few drinks before Christmas and said, ‘God, what would happen if someone like McCartney died when we were on air?’ And suddenly, there we were.”

It was like being in Central Park when Lennon died – all these people flocking to one place

The lack of preparation helped in a way, he says. “There’s a cliche about [radio’s] intimacy, but there’s something about the power of immediacy, too. You just react the way people react, then people come and join you. That’s the way it should be.” This 21st-century coming together for Bowie has parallels with how his imperial phase began, on Top of the Pops on a summer’s evening in 1972, when the Starman pointed down the lens at the viewer and “picked on you” – and of course there were so many “yous”. At a time when there were only three TV channels, that show drew huge audiences, audiences that are unimaginable today. Nonetheless, today’s social media allow the death of a hugely prominent figure to be marked – and shared – by everyone. After the announcement, says Keaveny, 6 Music was flooded with tweets, texts and emails. “It was like being in Central Park when Lennon died – all these people flocking to one place.” And the man who was eight when he became obsessed with Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes video knows why they did it. “Bowie’s music reminds you of a point in your life when new ideas start to open up for you, so here came these people talking about songs that reminded them of times they had lost, and people they had lost. And, hell, it reminds you you’re going to die, too.”

On Monday, 6 Music began a national conversation because Bowie’s power lay as much in the ideas he provoked in his fans as in his music. Archive interviews also allowed listeners to hear his voice: he sounded funny, warm and alive – indeed, immortal, as we always thought he was.

Late-morning presenter Lauren Laverne was at home playing with her son when her husband told her the news; she walked to the station listening to her colleagues, in tears.

“Being a radio presenter is a funny job,” she says, “because on one level, you are Smashie or Nicey or Alan Partridge, and you’ve got to come to terms with that. But it can also be a quietly profound job, because it’s often not about you – and it definitely wasn’t on Monday.”

David Bowie: Blackstar review – a spellbinding break with his past

Read more

Her show featured messages from a drummer in Yorkshire who Bowie had worked with years ago and had kept in touch with, and a heartbroken eight-year-old boy who had written to Bowie before his album The Next Day came out. “I was up that night till midnight worrying about him,” says Laverne.

On Monday, she says, it was like being in a car on the way to a funeral, and then someone starts telling a story. “Often they were were lovely, or made you laugh. Radio gives you that place – you feel like you’re sharing feelings with people you’ve grown up with, as we all did with Bowie.”

The way in which Bowie released Blackstar fed the whirlwind on social media – which was fitting bearing in mind that he’d said years ago that the internet would revolutionise musicians’ relationships with fans.

He gave them gifts to plunder, too – the lyrics of the single Lazarus (about heaven) and the fact that there was a lost song about death by Elvis Presley, with whom he shared a birthday. The refrain in album track Girl Loves Me was particularly sharp for grieving fans: “Where the fuck did Monday go?” As social media explored Bowie’s art thoroughly, in real time, it felt as if his old world was clashing brilliantly with the new. He was bringing people together again, the way he first did all those years ago.

“There was this feeling that artists like him don’t exist any more,” says Laverne. “But the fact that everything about his death seemed to be a choice, and was magnified through all these lenses, made us part of that, too. There was no one like him. He still feels new.”